Friday, August 15, 2008

Night thoughts

Lying awake at three in the morning, ill, I put an earphonein my ear and pick up Radio New Zealand National as ashort story is being read. For a few minutes it becomes myworld in the darkness. Who can this story be by? It seemsto be about a picnic by a river or lake—Mum, Dad and twoboys, called Les and Sid. It has the unmistakable tone ofwriting by a particular kind of male New Zealand writer,a style you might call blokish, in which there are gaps andsilences between emotions and their meanings. I thinkfirst of A P Gaskell; then O E Middleton. Eventually I comeround to thinking that it must be Owen Marshall. But itturns out my first guess was right: the story is “The Ghostof Christmas Past” by Gaskell. The curious thing is that I’venever read Gaskell. This is not a boast—if anything it’s anindictment of my superficial acquaintance with much ofNew Zealand literature—but it does suggest that the wholegenre of the New Zealand short story is small enough for itsmajor writers’ styles to be readily identifiable by someonewith a scattering of knowledge about it. If there's a point tothis anecdote, by the way, I'm not yet sure what it is.

1 comment:

I did the opposite recently - I was convinced a ss I had stumbled on half-way through was by Charlotte Grimshaw, but turned out it was by (usually poet) David Eggleton - can you imagine two more disparate NZ writers?